FICTIONS: The Day of the Carrot
Simon Petrie
It had been known since the early 1950s that high levels of radiation could induce gigantism in certain species. But since most of the early cases had involved arthropods and poisonous lizards of, it has to be said, a rather aggressive disposition, the commercial implications of this line of research were not as obvious as they might otherwise have been.
“Nuclear Physics for Market Gardeners,” p. 126, by Hank Bremsstrahlung
The initial plan had seemed simple enough: they’d dig it out. They cleared away the tangle of surrounding vegetation, oversized agaves mainly, until they had swept clean a circle maybe fifty yards wide. Then they started with shovels, got down seven, eight feet into the gypsum-loaded desert soil before it became obvious they weren’t making enough headway. At eight feet down in the trench, the carrot’s circumference was, if anything, larger than it had been at ground level, and who knew how far down it went before it tapered off?
“Fuckin’ thing’s growin’ faster’n we can dig,” Mo complained, and one or two of the others laughed, but it was a bitter, frustrated kind of laughter, didn’t last long.
Steve, sensing the crew’s growing despondency, called a break. They needed to rethink this. He placed a call to the hire service back in Albuquerque, ordered a couple of dozers, backhoes, a big excavator and as many bobcats as the hire shop could round up at short notice, and sent Jim and Candy off in the 32-wheeler flatbed they’d hoped to be loading by now. (Except the way that carrot was shaping up, the rig they had was looking nowhere near big enough. Steve started to calculate on the likely cost of hiring a triple. Were triples even legal on the I-25? Probably not, but it was either that, or wait for someone to construct them a railroad.)
Up close, the carrot glowed, even through its surface smudging of gray desert grit. It was so vivid, so orange, that it hurt the eyes. Several of the workers kept their shades on even when, in the trench or in the shadow of the carrot’s massive tufted top, they were shielded from direct sunlight. Steve had fretted over the carrot’s screaming intensity of orange to the extent that he’d gotten Mo to go over the bloody thing with a geiger, again, even though the site had checked out nominal this morning. The radioactivity was still hovering around background, so the coloration couldn’t be blamed on that. It was just, it seemed, that the human eye wasn’t accustomed to confrontation by so much orange.
Steve hoped the colour wasn’t going to present a problem for marketing. Maybe swedes would have been a softer sell?
First, though, they had to excavate the freakin’ thing, else there weren’t going to be any problems for marketing.
A desert location is essential: there’s something about the seclusion, the chill night air, the long hours of harsh sunlight, we’re not sure what, but it doesn’t work without it. Those early guys, with the ants and the gila monsters, they knew that too, but they didn’t know that they knew, if you know what I mean. And it’s not just the location, you’ve got to have the recipe right. The precise mix of eleven secret radioisotopes and nuclides is indispensible. But really, what it all comes down to is the people. You’ve got to have the best people in your crew, or you may as well just pack up and head home.
“Confessions of an Atomic Farmer,” p. 33, by Fred Cherenkov
The digging machines got them down to around twenty-five feet before sundown. It was a good effort, but Steve found himself reluctant to consider trying that approach again tomorrow. The further down they went, the wider they had to dig, to leave a corkscrew track for the machines to move in and out of the hole. Plus the desert’s soil structure, or what passed for it, was too treacherously friable, too crumbly, and tended to give way at the sides. At the end of the day they’d only been making slow progress, enlarging what was looking more and more like a broad, cake-tin-shaped depression that seemed to get wider, but not perceptively deeper. Tempers were fraying from frustration, accumulated heat, and dehydration. And Steve didn’t want to see anyone hurt or killed if the walls subsided. Plus, with the carrot’s exposed height now finally exceeding its diameter, it was becoming time to have concern for the structural stability of the vegetable itself. However-many-dozen-tons of carrot could do a man an awful lot of damage, if it happened to land on top of him …
Next morning, they made a desultory attempt to haul the carrot out with the dozers, using steel-wire-reinforced tugboat hawsers and a massive jury-rigged wrought-iron welded collar that looked like Paul Bunyan’s own chastity belt. The dozers strained in protest, engines screaming, smoke leaking from their dust-caked innards while anyone not ensconsed within a vehicle cab stood what they judged to be a good, safe distance back. One of the hawsers began to fray with a series of staccato metallic exclamations that took it almost to the point of snapping outright, and Steve had them stop. Getting those hawsers hadn’t been easy, nor cheap. Now he was thinking chain, each link thick as a man’s chest, and wondering where he could source some.
The carrot, of course, hadn’t budged. It was very slightly indented by the collar, to the depth of about an inch, on the side opposite to the hawsers’ anchorage point. Probably even those blemishes would grow out, if the extraction took too many more days …
The collar itself, though, was stretched and twisted where the hawsers had strained against it, and would no longer serve any useful purpose.
Mangoes, tomatoes, strawberries, kiwifruit, they’re all just a waste of time. Massive containment problems, when you super-size them. We had a melon once, would have supplied a whole city, Vegas I think it was, for a week or more, but it rolled and then smashed while we were trying to get it on the truck. Two workers crushed, one drowned. Horrible. Then of course it became evidence, so we couldn’t even sell it off even though most of the chunks were still perfectly good. Still pretty damned burned about that, actually.
“The Big Apple, Cucumber, Zucchini…” p. 88, by Leo Quark
Pulling it out sideways was, Steve conceded, always going to fail, particularly while they only had the carrot’s iceberg-tip exposed. Digging down further was out of the question, they’d reached the point of diminishing returns with the gear they had. To get significantly deeper, they’d need equipment he couldn’t even guess at.
It would take three days for the construction cranes, their crew, and the heaviest-gauge, highest-breaking-strain chain in the free world to get shipped onsite. In the meantime, he had the workmen busy infilling the hole with heavy-duty scaffolding, atop which they were welding together sheets of bomb-proof steel decking to make a platform sufficiently sturdy that they could then bring in the cranes close enough for good vertical leverage. Of course, he could have just had them fill in the hole again, but that would have seemed a step backward, bad for morale. Besides, he had a feeling he might still need that hole.
Steve was developing a grudging, adversarial form of respect for the tensile strength of the carrot. If they got through this successfully, he promised himself, he’d give serious consideration to exploring carrot as a construction material in its own right. The damned thing seemed virtually indestructible … and he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be able to face eating the stuff again anytime soon. And furthermore, if, if they got this one out (and at this point that seemed an if almost as big as the carrot itself), then he swore he’d not leave it so long with the next crop. After all, there had to be a decent enough market for baby carrots, something small enough for a team of men and oxen, or at least a high-end tractor, to overpower.
I’ve tried growing pretty much everything with these nucular farming methods. Thing is, we’re still really looking for something we haven’t tried yet, that’ll really fire up the public’s imagination, because so far it’s not received as much attention as we’d hoped. Except for that time the giant mantis got loose, and that was the wrong sort of attention.
Vinnie Centrifuge, cited in a Detroit newspaper article
The cost was ballooning out, in a way that gnawed at Steve’s griping innards. He didn’t like to think of how many thousands so far, not even including wages, and nothing, nothing, to show for it yet. This couldn’t take too much longer, or there just wouldn’t be any point on struggling on, his pockets were nowhere near that deep. Still, wasn’t the prize worth it? With carrots at thirty-nine cents a pound, that made a ton of the stuff a thousand dollars, near enough, at market rates. Even if they could only make twenty cents a pound, that still meant five hundred a ton, and this carrot was several hundred tons, couple of thousand perhaps even. A million-dollar carrot—once they got it out.
The cranes had better do the job. No option, no excuses. Right now, his home was on the line.
From ground level, it hadn’t looked so high up. Now, from his vantage point in the control cabin of one of three tower cranes, Steve found himself explaining away the first premonitions of vertigo. Damn, but he wasn’t good with heights. And this was what, one-fifty, one-sixty feet up? He wasn’t even sure it was going to be high enough. From what they’d seen from the digging, that carrot was in no hurry to taper to a point, might easily be three hundred feet long. A Washington Monument in day-glo orange, almost, just waiting to be unearthed.
From up here, it was almost impossible to appreciate the true size of the carrot. It looked only as large as—well, a carrot. It was only when he consciously reinterpreted the scene—to remind himself that those ants down there, crawling around the carrot’s tufted dome, were Mo and Jim, busy fitting Lifting Collar (Carrot) Mark 2 to the resistant vegetable, and herniating themselves trying to heft the massive links of chain into position. Jim gave the thumbs up, and the crane’s operator worked the controls so that the boom slowly swung round to take up position, its tip almost nuzzling the tips of the other two cranes’ booms.
Once the chains were all hooked into the collar, the cranes fired up in earnest. For the first minute or so, as the winches worked against the slack, there was a mechanical cacophony that marked the stuttering movement of chain links along the beam, down the tower. Then, all slack taken up, the motors bit in and exerted. The sounds now were of increasing strain as the engines laboured against the carrot’s inertia. Steve wondered anew at the wisdom of placing himself here, in a rickety framework at the vertex of opposed and fundamentally imbalanced forces. Again, from ground level the cranes’ towers had seemed perfect icons of stability and structural strength, easily the match of an oversized tap-root. From fifty yards up, though, the picture was very different, and quite unsettling. Steve’s palms grew clammy, and he gripped the cabin’s inner reinforcing in a gesture of futile desperation while the engines’ unhealthy clamour continued to rise alarmingly in pitch.
Were the booms meant to arc in that fashion, at all?
Visions for the future? My dream’s this peanut plant idea—got this site in Utah sorta mapped out, think it’s a national park for now or somethink, but anyhow—’bout as big as Chicago, or maybe St. Louis, you know, nothin’ too massive—anyways, this humungous plant, growin’ fifteen-foot goobers, we’d corner the peanut-butter market in no time. An’ the best bit’s the shells—you cut ’em careful-like, probly with one o’ them newfangled lasers or some such, leave ’em more-less intact, and just as a side product from your peanut butter you get all this low-cost, hell no-cost really, instant housin’. Think of it, a whole city of readymade peanut-shell houses, wouldn’ that be somethink!? ’Course, you’d have to check the tenants for anaphylaxis, else the courts’d have themselves a field day.
Excerpt from a radio interview with Victor Synchrotron
If there was a carrot somewhere, anywhere, that could laugh quietly to itself, then this carrot was that carrot.
Its growth, here, shouldn’t even be possible. The Chihuahuan Desert was no kind of environment in which to be setting up a vegetable patch, there weren’t the nutrients or the moisture. But the subsurface radioactivity, of which there was a knotted concentration directly below the carrot, had unleashed strange powers and incredible vitality, just as it had with the ants, the tarantulas and those bad-tempered lizards in the early black-and-white documentaries. Quite possibly, the carrot was getting all it needed simply from the desert air itself.
Right now, the cranes had proven as futile as all the things they’d tried in the past few days. Big Orange was still wedged as firmly as ever in place, and so far as Steve could establish, it hadn’t given an inch. They’d try again tomorrow, sure, after the cranes’ engines had been reconditioned—they hadn’t taken well to the exertion, overheating and leaking lubricant as through it were lifeblood—but Steve could tell, in his gut, that that carrot wasn’t going anywhere. It was playing for keeps. The damn thing was just too big.
So, did it just end here? The thought made Steve sick. He’d been greeted with skepticism, derision even, by the few people he’d sought to confide in (and borrow funding from) all those months ago, when the inspiration had taken him. And the kicker was that, though they’d all told him, mockingly, that the idea wouldn’t work, he was faced with the opposite problem: it had worked too well. Same overall result, though. Might as well have stayed home, ripping up greenbacks one by one, at least then he wouldn’t have these blisters on his fingers. Nor this sunburn.
There’d be no trying again, either, after this. Not for Steve. He’d thought it incredible good fortune when the land came on the market, laughably cheap—hell, who else would want a stretch of nondescript desert, no amenities, middle of nowhere? The sellers must have thought they were getting money for nothing, but Steve had seen the promise. He was in possession of a geological survey that showed the plot was penetrated by a thin, deep aquifer, trickling straight from the old nuclear testing sites at White Sands and Trinity. He’d known what those conditions had been capable of. And, dammit, he’d been right. For all the good it was going to do him.
“Blast!” shouted one of the workers—Jim, off in the distance, tending to an ailing engine—as the wrench slipped from his fingers and knocked against his knee. It was, for the group, an uncharacteristically mild cuss-word—Mo, in particular, seemed to think proper sentence structure required the inclusion of at least one ‘fuck’ in every dozen words—but Jim’s epithet stirred something in Steve’s thought processes.
How do you make a carrot smaller?
They’d need a mobile drilling rig—nothing too fancy, it would only be necessary to get down seventy feet or so—and some ammo. Probably take a couple of days to arrange, but it might well take that long to get the cranes operational again anyway. Short, stumpy carrot, higher overheads: Steve could see the profit margin, once so fat and juicy, dwindling ever further towards wafer-thin-ness. But, least it looked like there might still be a profit margin. If this worked.
In my opinion—and it’s not just my opinion, you’d find a whole heap of farmers saying the same—the whole field owes a huge debt to Steve Fusion, because if it weren’t for Steve, this wouldn’t even be a field. In either sense of the word. I sometimes wonder, if Steve hadn’t fallen down that hole, just what else he might have come up with.
“A is for Atom, Z is for Zucchini,” p. 271, by Ray Shielding
Mo sniggered to himself all the way back from the truck with the ammo locker. “Dynamite fishin’, yeah, tried that. Never thought I’d find meself usin’ the fuckin’ stuff for gardenin’, though.”
Steve had tracked down a couple of mobile drilling rigs, and when they’d arrived Mo and Jim had eased off some of the steel decking around the digsite. There was just enough space between the scaffolding to manoeuvre the drilling rigs. Candy had overseen the drilling of a pilot hole, nine inches wide, nestled in against the carrot’s mighty orange flank. It had gone smoothly enough, most of the way, but hit a problem just short of Steve’s hoped-for depth of seventy feet: at sixty-five, there was an impenetrable stratum of rock, and they could not take it farther. Sixty-five: it would have to do. It was the same story every other spot they chose to drill, all around the exposed orange butte of the carrot, except that when the drill head was pulled up from two adjacent vertical holes, there were traces of carrot visible amongst the desert grit. It took a while to figure that bit out …
At least, Steve thought, the drilling had told them something about why the extraction had been so problematic. He’d been envisaging a straight carrot, something that just required a simple vertical tug (if enough force could be applied, which was, as always, the question). But this was a carrot that had grown down sixty feet or so, and had then presumably made a sharp left, following the aquifer, when it hit the impervious rock layer. The bloody thing had hooked itself in good and proper …
Now they had a dozen holes spaced out around the object of Steve’s frustration, and Mo and Jim busied themselves arming each with a load of dynamite. Steve hoped it would be enough. This was getting progressively further out of his area of expertise.
They replaced the steel decking, hoping it would act as a blast shield, helping to contain the explosions, channel them against the carrot’s submerged bulk. Of course, it could just make things worse … but wasn’t that what this part of New Mexico was for? Letting off explosions you couldn’t predict, and didn’t necessarily fully understand?
The blast, when it came, was like a badly-rehearsed earthquake: the charges were supposed to detonate simultaneously, but they ended up staggering over several seconds. With each muffled explosion the steel decking shook and shimmied with a deafening nail-on-blackboard clatter, and when it was done there was enough dust to cause several of the workers to break into coughing fits.
The carrot appeared to be unscathed.
It was nearing day’s end. Steve’s head told him they needed to try the cranes out once more, to see if the blasting had succeeded, but his heart wasn’t in it. Neither, it seemed, were those of the crew. Desultory, that was the word. They fitted the collar, connected the chains, started up the winches, readied the tower cranes.
It was almost a little anticlimactic when the carrot, under the persuasive torque of three heavy-duty construction cranes, began to nose its way skyward like a super-slo-mo film of a badly-designed missile emerging from its snug silo. Steve watched, transfixed, with lumps of pride caught in his throat, as his machinery finally overpowered the truncated vegetable. The huge, stumpy mass—sixty-five linear feet, four hundred tons by Steve’s reckoning—was finally lifted clear of the ground, carrot juice dripping off its ragged lower edge like orange drizzle. Then there ensued a complicated dance while the three cranes jostled to manoeuvre it away from the hole, to lay it to rest onto flat earth. They looked like three stick insects squabbling over the carrot, but they were getting the job done. Shipping it to Albuquerque, to announce their success to the world, that would be tomorrow’s problem. Today’s problem, same problem they’d faced all week, was solved. Finally.
Even as a mere stumpy half-carrot, it remained a thing of majesty, a raw testament to Nature’s power and beauty. Steve turned and stepped back a way across the steel decking, to gain a better perspective on the sky-borne carrot as the cranes moved it into position for the night.
His backtracking boot found the lip of the carrot-shaped hole in the decking. He stumbled back and fell spinning into darkness, only stopping sixty-five feet later.
After my stint with Steve, I looked to diversify into livestock. But I don’t think that’ll ever be where the money is, there are just too many overheads involved in fencing and the like. Better to stick with market gardening, it’s just simpler all round, once you’ve figured out the problems with harvesting. Plus, I gotta tell you, it’s no fun trying to take out a fifty-foot chicken with a bazooka. Particularly when your first shot misses.
“Steve Fusion, that carrot, and the future of horticulture,” p. 166, by Candy Muon
Steve lived, but it would be a year before he left hospital; and in that year, the ideas he’d pioneered would be taken up by others who’d drawn inspiration from those newspaper photos of the massive New Mexico carrot, and who had taken the trouble to track down their own precious plot of radioactive desert soil. There were groups elsewhere in the state working on squash, and grapefruit, and potatoes, and whale-sized pea pods; and someone in Arizona was claimed to have an overgrown forest of broccoli stalks. They were exciting times.
For the first several months of Steve’s sojourn in the hospital, he was subjected to repeated operations while his broken body was rebuilt. During much of this time, the extensive damage he’d sustained to his mouth required that he was placed on a liquids-only diet, while his wired-shut jaw was repaired. Steve, through all of this, was uncomplaining; he was, the nurses all agreed, a model patient.
Except when the rostered meal involved puréed carrot.
—/—
Copyright © Simon Petrie 2010
About the story: Some stories happen quickly. This one took a while: I knew I wanted to write something about the overlooked commerical possibilities of radiation-induced gigantism, but couldn’t find the handle. My first attempt was set in Sellafield, with a giant lettuce and a tube-train-sized earthworm, but the assembled components just didn’t mesh. Besides, I’ve never been to Sellafield, and didn’t feel confident in the details. (Mind you, I’ve never been to New Mexico either, but once “Carrot” reared its leafy green head, I knew where I wanted to go with it.)
It’s not, I think, a story that naturally lends itself to sequels. But I have hazy plans for a murder mystery involving a dangerously large Brussels sprout…
Simon Petrie lives in Canberra. His work has appeared (or is due shortly to appear) in ASIM, Antipodean SF, Aurealis, Sybil’s Garage, Murky Depths, Kaleidotrope and several other places. His short fiction collection, Rare Unsigned Copy: tales of Rocketry, Ineptitude, and Giant Mutant Vegetables, is due out from Peggy Bright Books in March 2010.
